The Hungry Dead

by John Russo

  Cage four and cage five were isolation cages; in other words, a kind of solitary confinement. Number four held the serial killer, Chub Harris, and number five held the big oaf who called himself Hawk, who was turned into a zombie by Tiffany when she took his blood. Well, she had to have her nourishment, and she shouldn’t be looked down upon for this, any more than a tiger should be disparaged for having to kill and eat an impala, a buffalo, or even a human being. The earth’s creatures with their built-in inherited qualities could not in any way be blamed for living up to their true nature, which they did not choose and certainly could not control except by denying their instincts in a most painful and debilitating way.

  Even the serial killer and rapist, Chub Harris, could not be expected to overcome the festering predilections that had made him that way. He either had a brain defect or a defect in his upbringing that had warped him. He was a freak of nature or nurture and was thus incorrigible; he could not be rehabilitated so as to conform with society’s usual standards of behavior. Before assigning Blake Parsons and Spaz Bentley the task of ferreting him out and hunting him down, Dr. Melrose had thoroughly investigated his background in case there might be some redeeming or mitigating factors. But there were none that mattered. He was doomed to go on killing and raping until he was stopped. His birth name was Peter Harris, and he grew up right in Willard, and that was his constant prowling ground. He had a high IQ, but no trace of what is commonly referred to as a “conscience”—a respect for good deeds, a need to give and receive love, and an aversion toward evil.

  Pondering how he should make best use of the serial killer in captivity, Dr. Melrose considered the fact that men of Chub’s ilk had a single-minded urge toward the violent destruction of others that was not unlike the irrepressible inclinations of the undead. Did that mean that Chub Harris should be kept alive and studied in depth? Or did it mean that he should be immediately used as zombie feed because he was no good for anything else of any intrinsic value? Or, taking yet another tack, did it mean that the serial killer’s impressive ability to hunt, track, and capture his victims should be harnessed and turned to good use—in other words, providing he was kept under the watchful eyes of Blake and Spaz, could Chub be trusted to help gather the types of subjects that were constantly needed for the experiments being carried out here in the laboratory?

  Dr. Melrose decided that he would discuss this serious matter with Tiffany. She was wise beyond her years, thanks to the aberrant gene she had inherited from him. And Victoria was developing nicely in the same direction. Both his daughters were a wonder to behold, and Dr. Melrose had no doubt that as time went by they would both learn to be even more helpful than they already were. At present, he relied on them for carrying out a great deal of painstaking research, but they needed more math and chemistry to take on the most demanding duties of scientific inquiry. This process would be set in motion as soon as Tiffany began to earn her medical degree, and Victoria was destined to follow in her footsteps. They were both brilliant, as was to be expected in Dr. Melrose’s estimation since they had inherited such exceptional qualities from him.

  He watched Luke and Morgan wheel in the gurney containing the mortal remains of somebody Tiffany called Nutso, a person he didn’t think he needed to know anything much about, because Nutso would soon be zombie feed. Tiffany had already filled Doc Melrose in on this dimwit, who happened to be a cousin to the one called Hawk. This oaf had already been turned into a zombie, thanks to Tiffany. So his past, his family, and his genetics would have to be totally investigated and analyzed, for he would be an experimental subject. Perhaps he would even reveal DNA with markers similar to those of Dr. Melrose, although he very much doubted it at this juncture due to the fact that the oaf was an oaf, and the doctor could not imagine that anyone so oaflike would turn out to be a leaf on his own family tree. But one never knew, one never knew. Even the most brilliant of people could give birth to defective children.

  Dr. Melrose moved over to cage six and said, “Good day, Barney, how are you?” to one of the cage’s long-time occupants. This fellow was the very zombie who had bitten Dr. Melrose sixteen years ago. He had been so long in residence here that he was almost like an old friend, and the lab assistants, Luke and Morgan, had given him the nickname “Barney.” Dr. Melrose rather liked that little touch and eventually found himself using it with easy familiarity.

  Not long after Barney was captured, his background had been investigated. The initial leverage for the inquiry was furnished by his driver’s license, which happened to be in one of the front pockets of his bibbed coveralls. His real name was Horace Dalrymple, and he wasn’t an indigent barroom brawler, as one would think upon first impressions, but had been a hard-working dirt-poor farmer. He had been pulled off his tractor while he was working in his alfalfa field and had fought off an unknown number of zombies, but one of them had succeeded in biting him, and thus his fate was sealed. Though bitten, he tried to protect his wife and his twelve-year-old son, but seeing that he was bitten, they ran away from him, jumped into an old, battered pickup, and escaped into Willard. It was a miracle that the same zombies who attacked Barney did not overwhelm his wife and son, but then, the undead were slow-moving, and there weren’t too many of them in that locale during the beginning stages of the outbreak.

  Dr. Melrose had learned many of these details about Barney and his erstwhile family from newspaper and television interviews with the surviving wife and son after the outbreak was quelled, and had gleaned even more details by assigning Luke and Morgan the task of furtively prying into the Dalrymples’ past. He had considered uniting the family here in the lab, but he had decided to let Barney’s wife and son live out the rest of their lives normally, after reluctantly deciding that they had suffered enough.

  Barney showed few signs of age because zombies did not deteriorate much with age as long as they were properly fed. He was as huge and imposing as ever, his diet scrupulously maintained by the attendants and his weight preserved at a pretty steady three hundred and fifty pounds. He was still wearing the flannel shirt, bibbed coveralls, and clodhoppers of sixteen years ago, and every once in a while he was injected with powerful drugs to knock him out so his personal clothing could be disinfected and washed. There was a constant, creeping, underlying stench in the cage room, and the living people could only tolerate so much of it, and so now and then the long-term zombies had to be hosed down and their clothes had to be laundered.

  Dr. Melrose firmly believed in treating his zombies humanely. He respected the need to keep them as clean and healthy as possible in order to maintain, not just his experimental integrity, but also his own self-respect.

  He wasn’t a cruel man, just one who was exceptionally pragmatic and unflinching when it came to the needs of science.

  CHAPTER 14

  Tiffany entered her sister’s bedroom carrying the beaker of blood that she had taken from Jeff Sanders. She felt sad when she saw that Victoria was crying, looking at her hideously blistered face in a handheld mirror.

  “Don’t worry, Vicky,” Tiffany said consolingly. “You’re going to be beautiful again. I brought you a nice sweet drink to help clear up those blisters.”

  Victoria turned to face her older and presently lovelier sister. Her eyes fastened upon the beaker and its contents . . . and she licked her lips, already craving it.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” said Tiffany. “You instinctively want to drink it, don’t you? You understand that it will be good for you.”

  Victoria reached out quickly and took the beaker in her two hands. She stared at it hungrily, and her tear-filled eyes seemed to brighten a bit.

  “Don’t be so depressed,” Tiffany cajoled. “You’ll be better in a few days. When so-called normal people get porphyria they have it all their lives and must never go out in the sunlight. But you and I are different, thanks to the gene we got from Father. For us, the ugly symptoms eventually go away, and we become far superior to ordinary people.”

  Heartene
d by her sister’s words, with a faint smile Victoria brought the beaker of Jeff’s blood to her lips and drank. And Tiffany cooed to her and stroked her hair as she did so.

  CHAPTER 15

  Two uniformed sheriff’s deputies, Henry Burns and Jesse Halcomb, were on the road in their police cruiser. Henry drove while Jesse smoked a cigarette, which Jesse didn’t like because the smoke made him light-headed, sometimes nauseous. But he knew his partner was a nicotine addict, so he tolerated it.

  Jesse said, “We make the turn up ahead a piece.”

  They were looking for the hard to spot weed-grown entrance to a narrow dirt road that would lead them through the woods to the Melrose Medical Research Center, a place that apparently liked to keep itself discreet and well hidden. Sheriff Harkness had sent them out here in advance of the raid he was implementing, in case Jeff Sanders was in trouble and they might be able to do something about it to keep him safe. But the sheriff didn’t know what. He just had a premonition that he had to do something that might prevent disaster from happening before the logistics of the raid were properly organized so it could take place.

  “What if Jeff is still doing okay here, and we blow his cover?” Henry asked. “What’d the sheriff say about that, Jesse?”

  “We’re just supposed to show up acting like normal nosy lawmen and try to make sure Jeff’s okay. If we do stumble into him, he’ll be cool enough not to let on he’s ever seen us before.”

  But Henry was skeptical. “That’s the way the sheriff’s got it doped out, huh?”

  “Well, he says if we show up asking questions it ought to even help throw suspicion off Jeff. They won’t figure we’d put somebody undercover and still come around ourselves.”

  “I sure hope he’s right,” Henry said. “Here’s the turnoff.”

  He humped the cruiser off the main road and onto a narrow stretch of rutted mud and gravel that gave them a bumpy, twisty ride. And in about three hundred yards of this, they came to a cyclone fence, which was topped with barbed wire.

  “It’s electrified,” Jesse said.

  “Yeah, I can see that,” said his partner.

  They both stared at the carcass of a dead, badly charred deer that was sagging against the steel links of the fence as if plastered to it by a jolt of electricity. The two cops weren’t about to get out and touch that fence, so Henry laid on the horn in order to hopefully flush somebody out to greet them.

  Other than the presence of the dead deer, nothing seemed too spooky. It all seemed very quiet and peaceful in spite of what was rumored to be going on.

  When nobody came out to greet them, Henry laid on the horn again. Then he and Jesse got out of the car, and Jesse dropped his cigarette butt and stepped on it. They both looked around, trying to case the place, but there wasn’t much to see, just a big house farther back and several outbuildings made of cinder block.

  Henry said, “Why did Sheriff Harkness send us out here on a Saturday? Maybe they all take the day off.”

  “He said a Saturday might be exactly the right time to catch them with their pants down.”

  Just then, a lovely young woman came walking across the gravel, got up to the fence as the two cops gawked at her admiringly, and said, “I’m Tiffany Melrose. What can I do for you?” She was wearing tight shorts and a T-shirt that showed off her body, and she had an aura of haughtiness about her that did not disguise her disdain for the two lawmen.

  “I’m Deputy Burns,” Henry said, “and my partner here is Jesse Halcomb. We need to talk with Dr. Melrose. Is he in?”

  “Yes,” said Tiffany. “He’s back in the lab. I was helping him. He’s my father. We were in the midst of some critical experiments when we heard your horn blasting away at us. Very disturbing. We must get back to our work, so I hope you won’t detain us long. As you can see, this is an electrified fence, but I’ll cut off the current.”

  In her hand she held a remote-control device, and she hit some buttons and then opened the gate, saying, “Follow me, if you will, gentlemen.”

  She led them through a solid steel side door of one of the cinder-block buildings and into a large, thoroughly equipped chemistry laboratory complete with beakers, flasks, Bunsen burners, microscopes, and other more esoteric and complicated apparatuses that the lawmen were baffled by. Then she disappeared down a long corridor, and they watched her go, wondering what her game was.

  Dr. Melrose, a slim and bald little man wearing a neat white lab coat and wire-rimmed eyeglasses, came toward them after putting down a clipboard, and they had no trouble recognizing him from the photos shown to them by Sheriff Harkness. They took note of the scar on his throat, which they knew had been put there sixteen years ago, and it was so faint by now that ordinarily they might not have noticed it.

  “What can I do for you, officers?” the doctor inquired in his prissy little voice. “Let’s please be expedient. My daughter and I must get back to our important work. We don’t get any government grants, you see. We must flounder on our own. And time is money.”

  “We’ll try not to take up too much of your money then,” Henry said with heavy sarcasm.

  Then all of a sudden he made up a story off the top of his head that he hoped might enable him to more directly and cleverly find out whether or not Jeff was still on the premises. Lying through his teeth, he said, “A snitch told us he met a guy named Jeff Sanders who was hitchhiking out on the highway near here, and this guy Jeff is somebody we’ve been on the lookout for. He’s wanted for breaking and entering back in Willard. He tried to burglarize a jewelry store, and the alarm went off and he ran—but we got a good description. Our snitch said he talked about trying to get hired out here. He said it’d be a good place to stay out of sight for a while.”

  Henry hoped this made-up story would be a good excuse to get to talk with Jeff, under the pretense of grilling him about the phony jewelry store robbery, but Dr. Melrose didn’t fall for it. “We don’t have anybody new on our payroll,” the doctor lied. “And nobody has applied recently. In fact, we haven’t seen any strangers in a long time.”

  Jesse had readily tuned into his partner’s line of deception concerning the nonexistent snitch, so he continued ad-libbing the phony story. “You sure about that?” he shot back at Doc Melrose. “Our witness swears your daughter was seen with this Sanders hoodlum. Where’d she disappear to? We want to talk to her, and if we don’t like what she has to say, you can bet we’ll haul her in for some sharp questioning.”

  “You can take that to the bank,” Henry added meanly.

  Rattled, Dr. Melrose fell into the trap and blurted out some things that were partially truthful. “Tiffany went for a ride with some young fellows. We don’t know who they were, but I guess one of them could’ve been this Sanders fellow. They dropped her off here and went on their way. We don’t know any more than that.”

  Both of the cops now knew that Doc Melrose was lying about not knowing Jeff Sanders.. So they were more determined than ever to find out all that they could before they would let the sheriff and his raiding party risk their lives.

  “We’re gonna have to talk to Tiffany, no way around that,” said Jesse. “She might know a whole lot more’n you do, doc. Teenagers often do. So take us to her. Pronto. We’re not foolin’ around here. We’re after a dangerous felon.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to let you speak to her,” Dr. Melrose said, his thin mouth twitching. “But she won’t be helpful, not because she doesn’t want to be, but because she can’t be. She doesn’t really know anything. But come with me, gentlemen. We have absolutely nothing to hide.”

  The doctor escorted the two deputies down the long institutional corridor where Tiffany had disappeared, and at the end of it, there was a heavily bolted steel door. The door was bolted from the outside, not the inside, so the bolt wasn’t intended to keep people out. It was intended to keep somebody or something in. The deputies got immediately more nervous, but they didn’t say anything. Dr. Melrose undid the bolt and swung the door open on
nothing, it seemed, except murky darkness. Then the lawmen gasped and reeled backward, covering their nostrils.

  “Ugh!” Henry blurted. “What’s that smell?”

  “Something rotten!” Jesse echoed.

  “You’ll see better when I flip the lights on,” Dr. Melrose informed them prissily.

  Suddenly the area beyond the steel door was bathed in stark fluorescence, revealing the cage that held Barney and the other long-term zombies.

  The two deputies were so taken aback that Blake and Spaz, who had sneaked up behind them, had little trouble plowing into them, ripping their guns out of their holsters, opening the cage door, and shoving them in there. A savage battle ensued as the slavering zombies closed in, Barney taking the lead and shoving some of the others out of his way.

  For a time, Jesse and Henry held out and got in some blows, refusing to succumb easily to their fate. For fun, Blake and Spaz had teased them with faint hope of escape by leaving the cell door open, and they punched and clawed at the attacking zombies, trying to reach the opening, even though they were both being bitten in various places on their bodies.

  Dr. Melrose watched all this, fascinated, his thin mouth twitching, which seemed to be his way of showing delight in an impending triumph. He knew it was a foregone conclusion that the two deputies would not be able to hold out for long, and with bites all over them and chunks of their flesh torn out, they would be swarmed under. The hungry flesh eaters would crush them to the floor of the cage and continue tearing at them and devouring them till they were satiated.